If all follows as planned, the March for Indigenous Dignity, lead by 23 commanders and Subcommander Marcos of the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), will arrive at the Mexican capital on Sunday March 11 after traveling through 12 states in two weeks. The mass receptions registered in the route were endorsed in the Third National Indigenous Congress (March 2-4), which agreed to carry out a "peaceful national indigenous uprising" to back up the initiative. After a long period of silence, the Zapatista command decide to carry out its first public appearence in 7 years of conflict in order to hold dialogue with indigenous peoples and civil society, as well as with Congress, about the approval of the initiative of constitutioanl reforms on indigenous rights and culture elaborated by the (Parlamentary) Commission of Concord and Pacification (Cocopa), November 29, 1996. Legislative approval of this legal body consititues one of the three "signs" that the EZLN has given the new government presided by Vincente Fox for returing to the peace talks. The other two are the demilitarization of 7 military positions, of the 252 that the Federal Army has in the area of conflict, although this in no way implies a change in the correlation of forces and the liberation of the Zapatista prisioners. In a letter to the media, Marcos explained the importance of indigenous issues to his organization, in these terms: "The EZLN is an organization with an indigenous majority that has taken up arms for Democracy, Liberty and Justice for all Mexicans. Of the Mexican people, the indigenous person is the most forgotten, and because of this the EZLN demanded the recognition of indigenous rights and culture. This demand has aroused a great deal of interest throughout the entire country and the world. For the EZLN, the indigenous issue is a pending debt of Mexico and there should be no more delay in finding a solution. We do not want independence from Mexico, we want to be a part of Mexico, to be indigenous Mexicans. Until now we have been viewed as second-class citizens and as a nuisance to the country, we want to be first-class citizens and part of the country's development, but without giving up being indigenous peoples." Although during the electoral campaign Vincente Fox promised that upon election he would push for the constitutional approval of the Cocopa proposal, until now he has only sent this body of law to Congress, with the particularity that it is the first time in recent parlamentary history that a legal initiative has been sent without the presentation of presidential motives. That is to say, through this slight formal gesture, the leader has not publically established any commitment to push for or defend the postulates of this law. Peace on the Small Screen Since the march was announced, the government's attitude has been ambiguous, but its intentions clear: to retrieve and exploit if for its own ends, counting on the support of the media. In this way, the topic of peace has suddenly been placed in the center of the dispute of opinions. While for the marchers the recognition of indigenous peoples as collective subjects with full rights, which implies looking to the past and assuming responsibility of this historical debt, is a basic condition for a real and lasting peace; for the government and the elites it is about nothing other than establishing some assistance programs to correct the most extreme of the situations that this population suffers. For lack of proposals, the move has consisted in closing off the area of debate, superimposing the media circus. The most obvious expression of this strategy was the concert "United for Peace," put on by Televisa and TV Azteca. The show served not only to lower the profile of coverage of the Zapatista mach, taking advantage of the event's self-promotion, but also to renew criole indigenous thinking, which vaules the indigenous person only as a past phenomena, without a sense of the present, much less the future. Under this tendency, banalizing the march, nullifying its content, the elites hope to use the artifice of the media to impose the spectacle of a popularity contest between Marcos and Fox. From here, the insistence is in highlighting the abilities of the contendors to deal with the media, although without signaling that the force of the former lies in his ethical position, while that of the latter in his public relations consultants. In this context, the consolidation of unity between indigenous peoples that characterized the Third National Indigenous Congress (Nurío, March 2-4), where the 24 Zapatista delegates exchanged with over 3,300 delegates, opened up new perspectives that exceeded official calculations. Among their resolutions was the decision to carry out a peaceful national uprising through permanent mobilization until the legal initiative elaborated by Cocopa and the agreements of San Andrés are established in the Constitution.